Where LaTeX shines is for cases where you don’t really care about the details of the layout, but just want someone else to handle it all in a somewhat sensible way when you hand them a basic manuscript, and not shit all over itself the way MS Word does on a regular basis.
LaTeX is great for generic college papers where you don’t have figures and don’t have time to worry about the layout. By contrast it’s a huge pain in the butt for something like magazines, coffee-table books, or posters.
(It’s also the best way to typeset mathematical formulas, of course.)
- nice block text adjustment, line-breaks and hyphenation, line/paragraph,chapter spacing
- margins and padding, page numbers, and chapter headings
- font selection, supporting ligatures and kerning if you are fancy
I'm sure the devil is in the details, but how much detail can there be in basic running text? I'm fine reading novels rendered by basic html engines without css, even in monospaced font. The most important consideration for a text layout engine seems to be the font data format and corresponding font engine, which I don't know much about, because I don't really care.
There's definitely a learning curve to LaTeX, but not a huge one, as it's mostly just a markup language. If you want to get in to the programming side of it, or if you want to learn one of the larger LaTeX packages really well, that would take you more time, but not even then it shouldn't scare anyone, particularly if you've learned other high level programming languages before. Diving in to TeX itself could be a different story, but I can't comment since I've never bothered to learn it myself, and haven't had to for anything that I've done with LaTeX.